Why Darwin Would Have Loved Botox

I don’t mean that he would have been first in line at the doctor’s office to get a needle jabbed into his famously furrowed brow. I mean that Darwin would have loved to use Botox as a scientific tool--to eavesdrop on the intimate conversation between the face and brain.



For much of his life, Darwin was ob­sessed with faces. On a visit to the London Zoo, he gave mirrors to a pair of orangutans and watched them grimace and pucker their lips as they stared at their reflections. He passed many an afternoon gazing intently at photographs of crying babies and laughing women. He showed his friends pictures of a man whose facial muscles were distorted in various ways by electric shocks and quizzed them about what emotion the man seemed to be feeling. To find out if all humans expressed emotions in the same way, he wrote up a list of 16 questions, which he sent to dozens of acquaintances around the world. His list of questions began:

1. Is astonishment expressed by the eyes and mouth being opened wide, and by the eyebrows being raised?

2. Does shame excite a blush when the colour of the skin allows it to be visible? and especially how low down the body does the blush extend?

3. When a man is indignant or defiant does he frown, hold his body and head erect, square his shoulders and clench his fists?

Darwin took the answers he got from his correspondents--from such places as Borneo, Calcutta, and New Zealand--and combined them with the rest of his notes on faces to publish a book in 1872 entitled The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Most scientists in Darwin’s time considered the face a mystery, its expressions having been set at the time of Creation. But Darwin argued that the look of happiness or grief on a person’s face was the product of evolution, just as our hands evolved from fish fins.



As evidence, Darwin pointed to the results of his poll. People the world over made faces using the same basic patterns of muscle contraction, starting from infancy. In his book Darwin printed pictures of people getting electric shocks, which were taken by the French physician Guillaume-Benjamin-Amand Duchenne. Simply by running current through different parts of a person’s face, Duchenne could produce expressions of happiness, fear, anger, and disgust. Expressions were reflexes, Darwin argued, instinctive patterns etched in our faces and brains.

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Discover, November 2008
Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer